Eileen

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2016SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA NEW BLOOD DAGGER AWARD 2016 Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 inThe Times, Observer and Daily TelegraphFully lives up to the hype. A taut psychological thriller, rippled with comedy as black as a raven's wing, Eileenis effortlessly stylish and compelling. - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The TimesThe Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop. Trapped between caring for her alcoholic father and her job as a secretary at the boys? prison, she tempers her dreary days with dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, her nights and weekends are filled with shoplifting and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father?s messes.When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted, unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. But soon, Eileen?s affection for Rebecca will pull her into a crime that far surpasses even her own wild imagination.

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"Fully lives up to the hype. A taut psychological thriller, rippled with comedy as black as a raven's wing, Eileen is effortlessly stylish and compelling." -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst The Times
"Captivating... That she's a writer of rare talent and assurance is evident from the start of Eileen: the sentences unspool effortlessly, almost casually, though the material is dark and psychologically complex. The writing is shot through with lovely observation and detail... It's a testament to Moshfegh's skill that she can capture such extremes of light and shadow and, moreover, make us care about a woman who is, in so many ways, intensely dislikeable." -- William Skidelsky Financial Times
"Perverse, squalid and sinister...expertly paced novel... [A] bravura display of misdirection makes for a guessing game with a genuinely nasty payoff... [Moshfegh] delivers a thumping finish to match the build-up: a single line near the end has the effect of a thunderbolt, leaving us dumbstruck by her sly, almost wicked storytelling genius." -- Anthony Cummins Daily Telegraph
"Perverse, squalid and sinister...expertly paced novel... [A] bravura display of misdirection makes for a guessing game with a genuinely nasty payoff... [Moshfegh] delivers a thumping finish to match the build-up: a single line near the end has the effect of a thunderbolt, leaving us dumbstruck by her sly, almost wicked storytelling genius." -- Anthony Cummins Daily Telegraph
"There's something far more grubby and gritty here than one expects... Not afraid to peer into the darkest and dirtiest corners of her characters' lives, Moshfegh has proved herself an audacious talent, and without doubt one to watch." -- Lucy Scholes Independent

Author description

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. She was awarded the Plimpton Prize for her stories in The Paris Review and granted a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novel Eileen was awarded the 2016 Pen/Hemingway Award.